When Mark Plotkin was a kid growing up in Broadmoor, he thought the French Quarter was the most entertaining place on earth. His father ran a shoe store there -- Standard Makes, it was called -- and every Saturday, he would go down to the store to help out.

"This was before tourists," he says. "You still had little Italian mom-and-pop stores. No movie stars. I don't remember a single T-shirt shop.

"It was the high point of my childhood. You could see all sorts of wild sights that most 15-year-olds don't get to see: pimps, rock stars, pro athletes, Storyville musicians. It was a real lesson in diversity.

"It wasn't a Disneyland version of the French Quarter; it was the French Quarter. It was where New Orleanians went to play."

It never occurred to him, Plotkin says, that there was anything special about the place. Or anything special about New Orleans, for that matter.

But since he moved away from his hometown 35 years ago, Plotkin -- who returned this week to speak at Tulane University on the impact of climate change on shamans and the rainforest -- has spent his life in search of the exotic. First he got a Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Tufts University. Then he began traveling to the jungles of South America, to study the traditional medicine practiced by the shamans there. And ultimately he set up a foundation for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest culture.

Every year for the 30 years, Plotkin has visited Suriname, a small country just north of Brazil. And the more time he spends there, the more the place reminds him of New Orleans.

"Suriname is the New Orleans of the Amazon," he says. "You have all these cultures jammed together, living side by side.

"Very few places in America have the kind of cultural diversity you have in New Orleans. It's not like in New York where you have the Colombian section of Brooklyn and the Jamaican section of Brooklyn. It strikes me as more of a salt-and-pepper place than these others. In Omaha or Oklahoma City, you don't see the mix you see here -- in the streets, in the stores, at weddings.

"Well, guess what: It's like that in Suriname. The same kind of checkerboard, salt-and-pepper mix."

Plotkin even sees a similarity to New Orleans in Suriname's food and music.

"Just like New Orleans -- this crazy mix of culture and cuisine," he says.

In the music, he hears some of the African roots of traditional jazz.

"If you want to see what Congo Square looked like 200 years ago, visit Central Suriname," he says.

And the food there, in addition to being enticing, is a subject high on the list of important things in life.

"If they go into the bush, they bring a cook," he says. "They want to eat well."

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The mission of Plotkin's foundation, called the Amazon Conservation Team, is to work in partnership with indigenous people in the American tropics to conserve biodiversity, health and culture. Current projects include ethnographic mapping, traditional medicine clinics and the preservation of rare plants, particularly medicinal ones. All of the foundation's projects are undertaken in partnership with the native Indians.

"What's frustrating to me," Plotkin says, "is that 30 years ago, when I got into this business, they said we can't worry about the rainforest; we have to worry about population growth. Now they say we can't worry about the rainforest; we have to worry about global warming.

"It's like saying we have to worry about poverty in New Orleans so we can't afford to worry about the levees. Or we have to worry about the levees so we can't worry about the quality of the water we drink with all the chemical factories upriver.

"The point being that you have to worry about all these issues."

Today Plotkin leads an adventurous life, complete with ends-of-the-earth kind of travel, anchored by his wife and two children in Arlington, Va. While the foundation is his major focus, it is not his only one. He also writes books, gets movies made, delivers speeches and leads groups of donors on educational holidays in the Amazon bush.

It's about the only life he could tolerate, he figures, since academia is not for him and the real world has its limitations.

"Teaching intro botany to 19-year-olds is my idea of hell," is the way he puts it. "There aren't that many 52-year-olds who get to run off to the jungle and live with the Indians for a month.

"I don't want to retire. I've got the coolest job in the world."

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His next book, Plotkin says, is going to be about the search in the rainforest for a cure to cancer.

The subject is dear to him -- both subjects, really: cancer and the rainforest.

"I watched my father die of lymphoma," he says. "He died a miserable death."

And if Plotkin were diagnosed with cancer?

"I'd go right to the jungle in a heartbeat," he says.

The years he has spent with the shamans of the Amazon rainforest have taught him a profound respect for their work. He defines the term broadly: "A shaman is a man or a woman who combines different skills -- doctor, philosopher, singer of songs, keeper of legends, even the person who conveys souls to the underworld."

The plants in the jungle have yielded several important medicines, he says. And there are many more to be discovered.

"Western medicine is the most sophisticated system of healing ever devised," Plotkin says. "But it's got holes in it.

"Where's the cure for pancreatic cancer? Where's the cure for diabetes? Where's the cure for schizophrenia? For acid reflux? We don't have it.

"Some of these things, these guys may have the cure for them. They definitely have successful treatments."

The scientific community, he says, has trouble accepting shamanism.

"They think it's not scientific; it's an outdated worldview," he says. "I think of it as a parallel worldview," he says, "one which is internally coherent, makes a great deal of sense and allows us to explain phenomena we cannot understand otherwise."

Recently, Plotkin says, the research world has been more open to the possibilities of other medical approaches.

"When I was growing up, the thinking was that if we don't know it, it's unknowable," he says. "We're not such smarty-pants anymore.

"We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things we don't understand. Our system of medicine is just as puzzling to them as theirs is to us."

In fact, Plotkin says, about 80 percent of the people on Earth rely on plants for medicine.

"Not the drugstore, not the hospital, not the medicine chest," he says. "It's plants."

And they rely on shamans to deliver it. There is a basic difference, he says, between Western medicine and shamanic medicine.

"Western medicine is a combination of the chemical (what's in the medicines they give you) and the mechanical (surgery and things like that).

"Shamanic medicine combines the chemical with the spiritual. It's the whole mind/body thing."

While many people pit the two systems against each other, Plotkin is careful not to.

"I'm not one of those people who thinks the Indians have all the answers and the doctors have none," he says. "If I had a gunshot wound, I'd want to see a doctor. You don't want to go to an herbalist for a gunshot wound; you want a good trauma surgeon."

Every medical system that exists does something right or it wouldn't exist, he says. The Chinese medical system is 4,000 years old.

"If their medicine doesn't work," he says, "how come there are so many of them?"

RAIN, RAINFORESTS, SHAMANS AND CLIMATE CHANGE'What: Botanist Mark Plotkin delivers the keynote address at the Tulane University Law School Conference on Law, Science and the Public Interest When: Saturday, 6 p.m. Where: Tulane Law School, Room 110, 6329 Freret St. Cost: Free

Staff writer Elizabeth Mullener can be reached at emullener@timespicayune.com or (504)¤826-3393.